Winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Our Lady of the Ruins tracks a group of women through their pilgrimage in a mid-apocalyptic world. Battlefields, childbeds, forests of wolves and hanged men, pious sailors, mysterious saints, a warship, disarmed in the desert, waiting for the flood: all these figures, characters and scenarios populate the busy, evocative, second outing from Brimhall, whose brief, highly colored poems evoke a universe part Dylan Thomas, part saints legend and part Tolkien. Brimhall yearns to represent the greatest questions of ethics, politics, parenthood, sexuality, and religious life by means of invented history and syncretic myth.
"Poetry for the new century: awake to the world, spiritually profound, and radiant with lyric intelligence." —Carolyn Forché